Gum disease is now a very prevalent human health problem. Left untreated, gum disease can cause a substantial health problem. Partial or complete loss of teeth can result from gum disease, with associated pain and discomfort therefrom. Lost teeth are, of course, a major health problem. To treat the gum disease problem, periodontal procedures are applied.
To carry out periodontal procedures, a dentist is required to use special curettes. There are many different types of curettes. The curette is used to remove hardened deposits below a patient's gum line. Each curette needs to be very sharp, in order to remove these deposits. Each instrument is designed with a different blade angle, depending on the area of the patient's mouth in which the hygienist or dentist is working. The cutting edge of an instrument is angled or otherwise varied in this respect. When sharpening an instrument, it is very important to preserve the shape and angle of the blade.
Uniform removal of metal is important, because otherwise, the shape of the instrument can be changed; especially with regard to the angle of the lateral surface relative to the surface of the face. With few exceptions, only one cutting edge per tip of an instrument and only one lateral side must be ground during sharpening. The other lateral side is ground on a few designs of curettes, for example a sickle or a universal.
So therefore, in order to sharpen each instrument, a machine must be designed to provide a precise and a very accurate angle for each instrument. By precise is meant that the same angle on each particular instrument must be produced every time it is sharpened. Each instrument has a different angle, for different uses in different areas of the mouth.
It is highly desirable, even required, to have sharp instruments. Still it is just too costly to replace an instrument, merely because it is dull. Yet a sharpening device to precisely produce the desired sharp edge at the desired angle is not known. In fact, there is no known sharpening device for this purpose.
All currently known sharpening devices inherently rely on the operator's hand to hold the instrument to be sharpened in the proper position with respect to the sharpening stone. This factor creates a major problem, because the position of the operator's hand may change by as much as ten degrees without knowledge thereof by the operator. This factor causes an uneven removal of the lateral surface of the instrument, making the entire sharpening process very time consuming, inefficient, and tedious.
One known sharpening device requires placing the instrument on an abrasive surface, and vibrating the instrument very rapidly back and forth thereon. The hygienist, dentist or assistant places the instrument on the stone, and attempts to angle the instrument parallel to the line of the blade. This procedure is extremely tedious because the instrument usually has a round handle; and the lateral surface of the instrument, which needs to be removed in order to grind a cutting edge, has a varying angle. The angle of some instruments varies so often, that this sharpening procedure using this device just does not work to uniformly sharpen an instrument with the required accuracy.
Another known sharpening device has angles marked on a protractor-like scale for use with each instrument to be sharpened. The defect in this instrument is that it depends on a person being able to provide the same angle with his or her hand. Unfortunately, by human error, especially without a highly skilled person doing the sharpening, this device is inherently inadequate for producing the same surface on an instrument, because the lateral surface is only about one millimeter to two millimeters in width, and which needs to be preserved in order to keep the instrument in good working condition.